The Great PS3 Jailbreak

Early this month, Nintendo shut down its Miiverse social network after a brief five year run. However, the company was kind enough to offer post histories to anyone who requested them, and made good on its promise a couple of days ago. Everyone who made that request should have received a ZIP file with their comments and drawings, neatly arranged in a page that mimics the design of the late, lamented service. It's not a complete record of the time you spent at Miiverse- any responses made to your posts are toast- but it nevertheless gives you one last taste of what I feel was the most effective social integration in gaming history.

I'd like to talk a little about my time on Miiverse and share some of my favorite posts, but my thoughts are a little disorganized at the moment and I'll need some time to properly arrange them. Expect a post dedicated to the subject at a later date.

Instead, I'll discuss this recent development. A week ago, I was celebrating that I finally had a reason to turn on my Playstation 4 after months of neglect. Today, I've been given a reason to fire up my dusty Playstation 3, albeit for different reasons. There's a hack for early models of the system (all PS3 Phats and some PS3 Slims, but no PS3 Super Slims) that lets you install custom firmware, opening the door to a respectable homebrew library. There's not as much software as there is on the Wii, and it's not as flashy as it is on Microsoft's first Xbox, but there's enough available for the PS3 to make it worth the thirty or forty minutes it'll take to hack it. Special thanks to GBATemp.net for shedding light on this exploit, and to the team of bguerville, esc0rtd0w, W, and habib for creating it.

By the way, this was a fairly easy hack for me, but your results may vary. Be sure to follow instructions closely if you go through with it, and don't blame me if things go awry!

The main reason I tried this hack was because I heard a modified PS3 could play PSP games, either at their native resolution or with upscaled graphics. It's technically true, but the PSP emulator built into the PS3 was only designed to play simple games in Sony's "minis" collection. When tasked with more demanding titles, it stumbles. For instance, Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles works, but only the 3D remake of Rondo of Blood, and even that has difficulty displaying the titles which appear at the start of each stage. Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny won't accept any saves aside from the default, and Street Fighter Alpha 3 freaks out if you try to save at all. According to this compatibility chart, a third of PSP games refuse to run, either locking up the PS3 or sending you back to the cross-menu bar. I guess the takeaway is that you'd better hold onto your Playstation TV if you want to enjoy PSP games on a screen larger than four inches. (You know, the Playstation TV. That flat black thing you've probably got propping up a table leg.)

Homebrew emulation on the PS3 is a little more encouraging. Super NES games look great in 1080p, and the same could probably be said of MAME once I figure out how to turn off the accursed bilinear filtering. (Seriously, if anyone out there who's reading this makes emulators, stop making Cataract-Vision the default graphics setting. I guarantee you that almost nobody who actually remembers these games wants it.) Admittedly, the PS3's emulators are more difficult to set up than I'd like, and their user interfaces look pretty plain next to the visual spectacles of HyperVISION and Coin-Ops on the classic Xbox. However, given the superior specs of the Playstation 3 coupled with how easy it's become to jailbreak the system, things could improve in a hurry. I'll be keeping a close eye on the PS3 scene in the coming months to see if that dormant potential is tapped.